Why Are We Still Sleeping?

"Dearest Dreamers, Sleepwalkers, and Insomniacs,

This is not a dream. This is really happening. What we are seeing in Greece is the answer. The answer is far more complex and simple than the question. The question: how is it to be done? The answer: by acting.

How trite! How cliched! How many people have said the same thing? They are always screaming 'act', as if we had not thought of that before. We all know we need to act, it's just we don't want people to tell us to do it. We want to drink a few more cups of tea, smoke a few more cigarettes, drink a few more beers, read another zine, have another meeting, watch another video, think a few more things...and then, when we feel like it, we will act. But not before those things are done. Our desires must be fulfilled. Our infinite, horrible, bloated desires.

Our culture, in the heart of the Empire, has taught us to desire many things, things which most of the people in the world will never have or taste or touch. Our anarchism has been infused with a hedonism all too similar to the hedonism of Sarkozy and his wife. Our pleasure and the actualization of our desires is of the utmost importance. Our total liberation, unfortunately, is not.

All we know how to do is scrape a little pleasure off these jail cell walls. We desperately lick the moisture off the prison bars to quench our never ending thirst for a free world. But that is a world we will never live in as long as we are satiated with the excrement of the Empire, as long as we remain surviving machines.

The Greek request is as simple as it is profound:

STOP WATCHING, GET OUT ON THE STREETS

There is no preface or afterword for this request. The context for this request is the misery encircling us. No one can put it any simpler, and these fanciful words of mine are composed of nothing but desperation. Sick, tired and frantic desperation. Nothing else can be said, no one can make it any clearer than our brothers and sisters in Greece have made it.

I am tired of the excuses from all of you. I am tired of the decadence you pass off as liberatory. I am tired of your cowardice and your inability to commit. I am tired of writing these words over and over again. I am tired of watching the best of us be destroyed by your fear. I am tired of your posturing and superficiality. I am tired, tired, tired.

This is nothing but a guilt trip leveled at all of you. I wish guilt was not necessary, but what else will get through to you? You should be ashamed to call yourself anarchists. Save your pretty words and I will save mine. We are oversaturated with beauty and poesy. It is time to burn the brittle, preserved flowers we put in our hair. They will not make our lives better.

We are heading nowhere. We have nothing to look forward to. Misery stands above us, grinning with its dollar-sign eyes. Misery will win as long as we fail to act. Misery will win as long as proceed as normal. Normalcy is not the exclusive byproduct of the system. We liberated anarchists produce our very own stifling, debilitating normalcy.

Death to normalcy. Death to representative beauty. Death to passivity and excuses.

STOP WATCHING, GET OUT ONTO THE STREETS

This will be the last request until we hear it.

Let it haunt you until you act.

Your Arch-Nemesis,

Viola Chasm"

ORIGINAL SOURCE: Seattle Indymedia Center